In digital communications systems, such as those based on unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), the system may have greater capacity when less power is required by the digital payload. Moreover, a greater coverage area may be provided when less power is required. One of the greatest power consumers on the UAV is a receiver function of digital modems. A forward error correction (FEC) decode function block consumes a large amount of power. However, the FEC decode function block maintains the overall bit error rate (BER) and link performance.
A UAV supports user links, gateway links, and inter-UAV links. The FEC decoder is a large consumer of power for all of the wireless links. There is one FEC decoder allocated to each wireless link. There are a large number of user links since there is one user link for each user. There can be as many as 100s of active user links. There are typically a small number of gateway and inter-UAV links, on the order of 1 to 10.